Network elements, in, for example, Wireless Local Access Networks, often need to know the location of the devices communicating with the network. To determine the location of a device, a network element would send a request to the device and then receive an acknowledgement in response. The network element then determines characteristics of the signal containing the acknowledgement. For example, the network element may determine the Received Strength of Signal Indicator (RSSI). Other network elements can also determine the RSSI for the same device. Then, a set of network elements may triangulate the position of the device based on the received RSSI measurements.
In at least some of these networks, the requests are scheduled in close succession and sent to all the awake devices in an idle client list. The requests may be sent at the start of a fast-locate dwell interval. This process is quite rudimentary and inefficient, which causes delays with any active, in-progress, high priority traffic flows (especially bi-directional flows, e.g., Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)).